With all local authorities set a deadline of 2005 to deliver services electronically and many without the resources to acquire independent solutions, it has long been recognised that only realistic way to do this is to share both technical infrastructures and expertise. John Thornton, Director of IdeA, the Improvement and Development Agency for e-Government: “If local authorities work together and share costs and risks we could perhaps make savings of between 5% and 10%, say £100 to £300 million”.

For electronic services to be used by members of the public they must have confidence in the system, and the technical infrastructure must demonstrate that the flow of information is secure and complies with data protection legislation. Valid Information Systems, a leading UK supplier of e-Government solutions, has just launched a new module to add to its e-Government suite of products. The Middleware and Integration Server is designed specifically to support such shared working practices.

This product provides the interface between applications, sending data back and forth between back office systems and the web front end. The R/KYV (pronounced 'archive') v9 Integration and Middleware Server provides the platform for real-time transactional functionality such as payment and voting online, among others. The beauty of this product is that it is built on a modular basis for maximum flexibility and scalability. Further, written in J2EE Java, Extensible Mark-up Language (XML) and XML Transformations (XSLT), the product can easily be tailored to individual working practices.

The module complies fully with e-government standards including, XML, XSLT, HTTP Hyper Text Transfer Protocol (HTTP) and Java Database Connectivity (JDBC), providing compliance with the e-Government Interoperability Framework (e-GIF) and e-Government Metadata Framework (e-GMF).

To ensure the widest possible joined-up e-Government working, the module supports a range of rules to determine the protocols and the format of data exchanged, including: XML; XSLT; Java Database Connectivity (JDBC), Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI), Web services description language (WDSL), World Wide Web Distributed Authoring and Versioning (WebDAV) and Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP).